Dark smoke from oil fires extend for about 60 kilometers south of
Iraq's capital city of Baghdad in these images acquired by the
Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) on April 2, 2003. The
thick, almost black smoke is apparent near image center and contains
chemical and particulate components hazardous to human health and the
environment.
The top panel is from MISR's vertical-viewing (nadir) camera. Vegetated
areas appear red here because this display is constructed using
near-infrared, red and blue band data, displayed as red, green and
blue, respectively, to produce a false-color image. The bottom panel is
a combination of two camera views of the same area and is a 3-D stereo
anaglyph in which red band nadir camera data are displayed as red, and
red band data from the 60-degree backward-viewing camera are displayed
as green and blue. Both panels are oriented with north to the left in
order to facilitate stereo viewing. Viewing the 3-D anaglyph with
red/blue glasses (with the red filter placed over the left eye and the
blue filter over the right) makes it possible to see the rising smoke
against the surface terrain. This technique helps to distinguish
features in the atmosphere from those on the surface. In addition to
the smoke, several high, thin cirrus clouds (barely visible in the
nadir view) are readily observed using the stereo image.
The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer observes the daylit Earth
continuously and every 9 days views the entire globe between 82 degrees
north and 82 degrees south latitude. These data products were generated
from a portion of the imagery acquired during Terra orbit 17489. The
panels cover an area of about 187 kilometers x 123 kilometers, and use
data from blocks 63 to 65 within World Reference System-2 path 168.
MISR was built and is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, for NASA's Office of Earth Science, Washington, DC. The Terra satellite is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team.
Text acknowledgment: Clare Averill (Acro Service Corporation/Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
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